The 2023 season was a very important one for the Premier Rugby Sevens.

In its third year of competition, PR7s had proved a stand-alone professional league could compete at multiple locations. Premier Rugby Sevens CEO Owen Scannell was seeing more fan excitement; the quality of competition was continuing to increase. So 2023 was time to make another move. 

PR7s doubled the number of teams that compete from four each in the men’s and women’s competition to eight each; the season saw the number of tournaments expand from three to five with a total of 4 matches played and three championships—men, women, and united.

The United championship is unique in major sevens competition, which the men and women franchises combining their results from all five tournaments to get what is essentially a best franchise title.

Ultimately, the Northern Loonies women took home Kathy Flores Cup; the SoCal Rhinos x Loggerheads men won the A. Jon Prusmack Cup, and the United Championships went to the Rocky Mountain Experts, the only franchise to have both their men's and women's teams qualify for the championship event in DC.

A Marathon Not A Sprint

“Over the course of the competition we have always been looking at the broader thought of growing the game,” Scannell told GRR in a long-ranging interview this fall. “We wanted to get to a place of an exciting competition at its core. For every step we take we know there’s a tremendous amount of jeopardy and high stakes. And it’s a marathon not a sprint and we’ve seen a lot of flashes in the pan. We have always wanted to have a competition that we can come back to and doesn’t expand and contract in fits and starts.”

It was a big step, then, but one under some control. With the Olympics coming in 2024 (something that will no doubt have an influence on how PR7s will be organized), Scannell felt the league had to expand not only in events but in the number of athletes competing.

“Momentum is important,” he said. 

Every Game Matters

But expanding isn’t the only thing, and rugby in America has been guilty of forcing more teams into a competition without a concern of the competitive level. That’s why they worked up the two Western tournaments and the two Eastern tournaments, both leading to the Championship event in August.

“What that allowed us to do was cover a lot of the country,” explained Scannell. “But we needed some sort of qualification process because what we also wanted was a competition where every game matters. With every game having implications toward qualification to the championship, you can’t take a play off. It was a fantastic success. It was exciting to see who was going to get everything together at the right moment. And that translated onto the field. Over 70% of the games were within one score; they came down to that final possession and we had multiple games where a team scored a try and declined the conversion, ran back to kick off, and scored again to win.”

All of that backs up the idea most famously advocated by the NFL—competitive balance and a clear goals of making the championship tournament and then winning the championship tournament—create urgency in every game.

“This past year I finally got to watch a lot of the games live,” said Scannell, who, like many who work within PR7s end up working on other things as the games are going on. “I was really excited. I finally got to see the games and see them in the context of what was going on with the competition. I found myself putting on my fan hat and reacting the way a fan would on games. It was really exciting, and it bodes well, I think, for the future.”